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Do you actually audit open source projects you download? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.

Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?

Let's hear it!

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Nah not really...most of the time I'm at least doing a light metadata check, like who's the maintainer & main contributors, any trusted folks have starred the repo, how active is development and release frequency, search issues with "vulnerability"/"cve" see how contributors communicate on those, previous cve track record.

With real code audits... I could only ever be using a handful of programs, let alone the thought of me fully auditing the whole linux kernel before I trust it 😄

Focusing on "mission critical" apps feels pretty useless imho, because it doesn't really matter which of the thousands of programs on your system executes malicious code, no? Like sure, the app you use for handling super sensitive data might be secure and audited...then you get fucked by some obscure compression library silently loaded by a bunch of your programs.

this post was submitted on 29 May 2025

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